Christmas: Round 2

Ella in her new earrings from Auntie Zyra

Ben waiting to open presents in his dinosaur jammies

Wow, this particular holiday is never ending for us. With so much family close around, we take a good 3 weeks to get all of our celebrations done. The title of this post is a little untrue as this is actually our 4th Christmas in the past 3 weeks. It's lovely to stretch out this holiday, but to be truthful, I'm kind of glad it is over. Ella had more presents to open and Ben had more paper to shake around and make noise with. Talk about stimulation...or maybe over-stimulation. With all of the hoopla, I think the kids may even be glad to get back to some normalacy soon.


Back to Christmas in TRF. It was lovely as usual. We have spent oodles of time with family and I just love that. I enjoy my Christmas time with Jason's family...but it's just not the same as when I come home to all the usual smells and traditions that I have grown up with. There's just something so comforting about being back home. My family has two traditions that I just love. The first is our Christmas meal. It's all just appetizers, special things that we don't get throughout the year. It's not a big fancy ham with all the fixings or a turkey with the trimmings, it's a lovely huge spread of nothing but delicious appetizers complete with sparkling cider and egg nog. The second tradition is our gift giving. We draw names in our family. This is sooo nice as no one gets stressed out about buying for everyone and no one is eating mac-and-cheese for the whole month of January so they can pay off the bills. It's just so managable and it helps me keep the focus on Christ. Here's my favorite part of all of it. You buy for your designated person and then also donate to a charity in that person's honor. We all sit around the tree and go around one by one hearing about the charity that has been selected for each person and why it was picked. What a lovely thing.